Nevertheless, the result was pretty alright: we scored 4th place out of about dozen teams. The theme this time was an “artillery” game with few mandatory features: two types of energy-like resources (HP & MP), achievements and multiplayer gameplay.
We nailed the last one by implementing support for two mice at once. This allowed us to come up with an interesting idea inspired by the Atari game Rampart: two castles that expand and attack each other in a fast-paced duel full of frantic clicking. And because the attackers, or guardians of each castle are dragons, hence the game’s title: Here Be Dragons.

In retrospect, we should probably have narrowed the scope of our project more. Doing it 3D was ambitious in itself, but packing it with all the features we planned the night before turned out to be slightly too much :) In the end we didn’t even have time to code any sound effects or music!… That’s certainly a lesson to learn here.

But all in all, it was great fun. It certainly inspired me to maybe try and brush up my gamedev skills a bit more :)

Yesterday I came back from IGK conference (Engineering of Computer Games) in Siedlce. Among few interesting lectures and presentations it also featured a traditional, 7-hour long game development contest: Compo. Those unfamiliar with the concept should know that it’s a competition where every team (of max. 4 people) has to produce a playable game, according to particular topic, e.g. theme or genre. When the work is done, results are being presented to the public while a comittee of organizers votes for winners.

As usual, I took part in the competition along with Adam Sawicki “Reg” and Krzystof Kluczek “Krzysiek K.“. Topic for this year revolved around the idea of “escape” or “survival” kind of game, so we designed an old school, pixel-artsy scroller where you play as a prisoner trying to escape detention by running and avoiding numerous obstacles. We coded intensely and passionately, and in the end it paid off really well because we actually managed to snatch the first place! Woohoo!

A whopping amount of 15 teams took part in this year’s Compo, so it might take some time before all the submissions are available online. Meanwhile, I’m mirroring our game here. Please note that it uses DirectX 9 (incl. some shaders), so for best results you should have a non-ancient GPU and Windows OS. (It might work under Wine; we haven’t tested it).